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Her anti-fascist, Anglophile parents sent her to finishing school in England and from there she moved on to the Slade where she met the painter Victor Willing, who was married. Rego was born in Lisbon in 1935 and grew up under the Salazar dictatorship.
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The determinedly personal nature of her work, its magic realism, and her figurative if not realistic style put her outside the current of art that believed for much of the 1980s and 1990s that painting was dead and video, photography and installations were alive. What seems remarkable today is how isolated Rego was for a large chunk of her career. Events and Offers Sign up to receive information regarding NS events, subscription offers & product updates. Ideas and Letters A newsletter showcasing the finest writing from the ideas section and the NS archive, covering political ideas, philosophy, criticism and intellectual history - sent every Wednesday. Weekly Highlights A weekly round-up of some of the best articles featured in the most recent issue of the New Statesman, sent each Saturday. The Culture Edit Our weekly culture newsletter – from books and art to pop culture and memes – sent every Friday. Green Times The New Statesman’s weekly environment email on the politics, business and culture of the climate and nature crises - in your inbox every Thursday. The New Statesman Daily The best of the New Statesman, delivered to your inbox every weekday morning. World Review The New Statesman’s global affairs newsletter, every Monday and Friday. Morning Call Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. The Crash A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown. Sign up for The New Statesman’s newsletters Tick the boxes of the newsletters you would like to receive. Her updated method worked: the pictures have been credited with helping the success of a second abortion vote in Portugal in 2007. And what you want to do is make people look, make pretty colours and make it agreeable, and in that way make people look at life.” Pretty colours and painful subjects was the formula of a great deal of traditional religious art too. The pictures show no blood or medical intervention because “I didn’t want… anything to sicken, because people wouldn’t look at it then. You don’t get pregnant on your own, do you?” She knew what she was talking about, having had an abortion while still at the Slade School of Art in the early 1950s – it was not her only one. In the pictures she said she was “doing what I can with my work, but both men and women need to stand up to this.
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Something of this same instinct lay behind one of her few series with an explicit subject, the abortion pictures she made in 1998 as a response to a failed attempt to legalise terminations in her native Portugal. Something, whatever it might be, is happening and it is meaningful. The viewer might not know exactly what’s going on in an image but they can feel a charge, a squirt of queasiness in the stomach or a subtle but tangible miscalibration between mind and body. The pictures are, however, always visceral. There’s religion, birth, death, and illness too, rarely specific and never concerned with conventional beauty. Her nursery-rhyme illustrations with their blind mice, menacing spiders, cavorting insects and animals offer an instant passage back to formless childhood night terrors that never quite dissipate in adulthood her big paintings of a girl polishing her father’s leather boots, tying her cadet brother’s shoelaces or plucking a goose clamped between her legs contain, somehow, the swirl of sexuality the pictures featuring her “dollies” – the human-size creatures she made herself with pillow heads or rabbit faces – invoke the cast of characters and characteristics that make up a single human being and allow it to function her large pastels of women crouching like dogs, sprawling and lying splayed suggest the rawness of femininity untrammelled by social convention. What she had inside herself was bewildering, powerful, often sinister – although Rego always denied this trait – and inevitably universal.įor the viewer, her pictures are about recognition. She insisted instead that art was about going “to the origin, the imaginative origin that provides the images of what we have inside us, without us knowing what it is”. Paula Rego never sought to explain her inexplicable pictures.